Viewing Movie Files on a Mac?

I have a half dozen DVD movies (yes I own them) backed up on a HDD that were done on my PC before I switched. These are the movies the kids watch when we travel, so if they lose, or damage a dvd I really don't care.

Anyway, in my switch to eliminate all things pc, I have these files and I wondered if (a), I can view them right on my mac using some sort of video player, (b), when I need to, can I use toast to burn a clean copy down the road?

As an aside, I'd also like to know how (once I purge all my picture and document files) to format an external drive that is currently FAT32 and make it into a Mac compatible drive.

Thanks in advance for the help and advice.

For playing movies, nothing beat VLC Media PlayeR: VLC media player - Overview

VLC is an excellent media player

If you want to stick with quicktime, Perian can extend the video codecs it can use Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime® components

as for disks, Disk Utility in Applications / Utilities can handle that

I just tried it VLC and while it works... the movie (air bud) is divided into like 8 VTS*.VOB folders, so at the end of the 1st section, the movie goes dead. I tried clicking on all of them but you can't do that. I was hoping it would treat the group as a movie and play it from start to finish.

Just drag the entire VIDEO_TS folder into VLC and it should play without any interruption.